The importance of any scholar can be justified with either of three arguments: They wrote many and important works, furthering one or even several disciplines; they taught many students who went on to become themselves important scholars; or people more generally benefited from their dispensation of helpful information. Ideally, a scholar would combine all of the above, which should reflect in them being appointed to influential positions in educational institutions. However, as today, so in the 16th century politics played a role in appointment processes, and often enough the person skillful in those could overcome someone more knowledgeable in the discipline to be taught.
Continue reading “Teaching and transmission in 16th-century Damascus”Introducing: ʿAʾisha al-Salihiyya
This week we return to the final biography in the chapter on women in Ibn Tulun’s work al-Ghuraf (fol. 359a). The subject of the following short biography sheds light on some intriguing aspects of such transmission. It also poses somewhat of a riddle with regard to her own role within transmission.
An owner of Ibn Ṭūlūn manuscripts: ʿAbd al-Salām al-Shaṭṭī
As Ibn Ṭūlūn wrote several hundred works and did so almost five hundred years ago by now, it stands to reason that the corresponding manuscripts might have changed hands several times over since their creation. Moreover, later readers, owners, and book traders were instrumental in the survival and recognition of those manuscripts as Ibn Ṭūlūn’s. This post explores one of those people whose personal collections included such manuscripts. Continue reading “An owner of Ibn Ṭūlūn manuscripts: ʿAbd al-Salām al-Shaṭṭī”
The Princeton ijāzas
Over the last year, Ibn Ṭūlūn’s documentation of teaching has repeatedly been addressed here. According to my own plan, this will be the last post on this issue for the foreseeable future. Thus, I would like to use this post to talk about some more general characteristics of these documentary texts. Once before, the difference between ijāzas and samāʿāt in this corpus has been discussed. Now it is finally time to give the ijāzas a more structured treatment as the samāʿāt received back then. Continue reading “The Princeton ijāzas”
An ijāza for Ibn Mufliḥ
Akmal al-Dīn, a scion of the prominent Ḥanbalī Ibn Mufliḥ family, was mentioned here several times before and was probably the most visible of Ibn Ṭūlūn’s students in terms of engagement with his writings. Ibn Mufliḥ copied them, annotated and rubricated them, and also added material to some of them.
Among the evidence of their student-teacher relationship survives an ijāza Ibn Ṭūlūn penned for Ibn Mufliḥ after the latter’s discussion of some chains of transmission he had received from him (for the transcripts, see github). This document survives in the Istanbul manuscript MS Laleli 3747, fols. 192b-193a. Unfortunately, I have no further information about the other contents of this manuscript except that it did not contain any other writings by Ibn Ṭūlūn. Continue reading “An ijāza for Ibn Mufliḥ”